Toon Style Explosion
Somethink like this ? (Using similar, not same teqniques?)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3XZjhESZPxA


At the firs place, its not my tutorial, originally its from Pierrick Picaut
and his P2Design. Also you can download whole tutorial from official https://gumroad.com/l/Stylised-explosion-blender for free.

And how he made it ? 

The explosion is created by animated mesh with various noise displacement and animated parameters. You can use particle system with noisy-spheres like the mesh also.

For material Pierrick used MatCaps, with right outline setting for smoke, but you can use whatever you like if you get right fresnel-like faced soft outline.


For the exact explosion he used Color ramp and emmission node like this:

This system of material can be used for every toon-like visual, you can use every color you want, or mix with other properties like noises or lights.

So after all if you want change the smoke from shiny yellow-red color to calssic grey smoke Pierrick used Mix node and he animated fac property with greater then mathematical node.



From there is the same steps for every part of explosion. But you can use transparency node instead color ramp at the second input in mix node, so you will get only kinf of outlines for the details.